


flowers on the floor

by emeraldcitydowntowngirl



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Hanahaki Disease, Love Confessions, M/M, Post-Hiatus (Fall Out Boy), Valentine's Day, lots of mention of puke... too much, slight body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-02-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:01:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22472263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emeraldcitydowntowngirl/pseuds/emeraldcitydowntowngirl
Summary: The flowers make their grand entrance right after Fall Out Boy’s third and final comeback show. In retrospect… Pete should have seen this coming.(OR: pete's got hanahaki disease AKA the valentine's day curse and patrick is blissfully unaware. good times!)
Relationships: Patrick Stump/Pete Wentz
Comments: 20
Kudos: 59
Collections: Be My Peterick Valentine 2020





	flowers on the floor

**Author's Note:**

> please check the tags before reading jus in case!! its not too bad because i decided HELLA last minute that i didnt want this to be angsty, i really wanted something fun, something for the [valentines day petericks creations challenge], something for the girls to get ready to and party .... 
> 
> also you dont choke over flowers in this fic, you puke them out cuz *pete voice* puking excites me :(

The flowers make their grand entrance right after Fall Out Boy’s third and final comeback show. In retrospect… Pete should have seen this coming. 

Maybe not the flowers, _definitely_ not the flowers, but the _feeling._ There has always been some part of Pete that has been in love with Patrick since the very beginning, argyle sweaters and black socks, but these past three days? Being in each other’s faces constantly and performing the songs that they wrote together over the phone and through emails in secret because they didn’t want the world to know and taking pictures with Kerrang! and breathing in each other’s sweat on the plane and laughing with each other at radio stations about how surreal it is to have the gang back together again and— it should have come as no surprise to Pete that those feelings were going to come back to him and make themselves known.

But it _does_ come as a surprise. To be fair to Pete, though, it’s not everyday that the universe warns you that you better admit your feelings to your best friend via flowers growing in your body before it’s too late.

“Oh fuck,” Pete says to himself, blinking down at the hot red mixture of roses and rum he threw up in the toilet. “Oh _fuck_.”

* * *

The Valentine’s Day curse has an actual name— the phenomenon is just named after the holiday because the symptoms show up near Valentine’s Day, what with all of the love in the air. Only certain people are predisposed to the curse, with Pete’s luck of course he would be one of them, and the nature of the whole thing is that unless you tell the object of your affection that you love them _and_ they reciprocate your feelings, the flowers that have been sprouting in your lungs and lining your stomach over the course of a couple of days will either become too big to travel through your esophagus and in turn tear up your throat so that you die choking over them, like choking over the words to tell the person that you love your true feelings, _or_ the flowers will travel to your heart and you’ll die when your heart splits in two, a literal representation of what the rejection feels like.

So, Pete’s mildly freaking out.

“Dying is off the table,” Pete says to Brendon, over the phone. The internet told him that green tea soothes the flowers growing inside of him, so he’s nursing a green tea in his hands. His palms are sweaty. “Maybe things would be different if I didn’t have Bronx, but I do, and I’m not— things are finally fucking going okay. I felt like I could finally take a breath when we made the announcement and now I feel like… two steps back, you know—”

“Yeah, no, I get it,” Brendon cuts him off. 

Pete should have known better to confide in Brendon of all people, since he is notoriously _the_ worst person to text in a crisis, but… there’s a method to the madness.

“I don’t know what to tell you that’ll make you feel better,” Brendon says. “I mean, dude, you know what The Surgery did to me. I don’t see any alternative _but_ telling him how you feel working out for you. And _if_ you get The Surgery, you wouldn’t even be able to stand being in the same room as him, nevertheless be in _the same band_. You’re a sensitive dude.”

“I’m not sensitive, _you’re_ sensitive…” Pete grumbles. 

The internet told Pete that if he got The Surgery, capital letters necessary, his feelings toward the object of his affections would turn into indifference. Pete’s experience of talking Brendon off the ledge for two years straight after Brendon chose to get his flowers for Ryan removed tell him something else. 

“Maybe it’ll be okay…?” Pete asks, but it comes out hollow. Because he remembers how it got for Brendon, remembers the way Brendon would have to get hammered just to sing Ryan’s lyrics on stage, remembers how Brendon would spit out Ryan’s name as if they weren’t best friends, as if Brendon wasn’t once in love with him. 

“It won’t be,” Brendon says. “I wouldn’t get the surgery if I were you.”

“I’m not dying on my kid,” Pete says. 

“Yeah, and I’m not telling you to,” Brendon emphasizes.

“What, you want me to tell him?” Pete asks, and he _has_ to laugh. “Patrick. You want me to tell _Patrick_ that I’m in love with him.”

“I don’t know what’s so weird about that. I mean, we know he’s not a selfish cunt like Ryan who runs away from shit when he’s confronted with it. We know Patrick’s not straight.”

“I mean… do we? Also, nice man.”

“Sorry, all this flower talk is bringing up weird shit. And we _do_ know Patrick’s not straight. Come on, what straight dude comes up with something like Soul Punk,” Brendon snickers. 

“Can you be serious? For once?”

“Patrick’s not straight! I mean, we both saw him making out with… whatever the cute guitar player’s name was on Halloween a couple years ago. And he wasn’t nearly as fucked up as we were! He was stone cold sober, he drove me home and he was pissed about it and I remember feeling vaguely guilty for ruining that whole thing but not bad enough. Ya feel?”

Pete remembers that Halloween. But making out with a dude at a Halloween party isn’t gay… that’s just a Halloween party. Patrick’s a weird guy, he’ll talk about everything with anyone but no one really knows if the bisexual thing was a phase or if it just _is_. Patrick’s single, Pete knows that, but there’s been no talk about men because Patrick and Pete don’t have that kind of relationship. 

“I remember,” Pete sighs. “But I don’t remember if that was his boyfriend or if it was just a ‘find a warm body’ sort of thing. I feel like we were doing coke.”

“Probably. Aw, what a match,” Brendon says. “ _I’m half_... sorry, I don’t know your lyrics.”

“Huh. I know your lyrics considering I wrote half of them.”

“ _Nice_.”

There’s a moment of silence that brings Pete back to the fact that they’re talking about his fucking life here. There’s this unsettling feeling in the pit of his stomach that he can actually attribute to something and he tastes dew in his mouth when he swallows spit that reminds him of April mornings.

“Can I just tell you that I actually have trust in Patrick?” Brendon asks, his voice softer now. “Can I just tell you that I think you would be a fucking moron if you didn’t do this? I’m just gonna tell you. You’d be a _fucking_ _moron_ if you didn’t say something.”

“Right…” Pete bites at his hangnails and he stares at the drawings on the refrigerator in the dark kitchen and he knows that he has to tell Patrick. That this phone call wasn’t going to tell him something he didn’t already know. This thing can’t live in him forever, these unattended feelings that have been left in the deepest darkest corner of his heart to rot, he _knows_ that. But he’s never been lucky in love and Patrick’s his best friend and the whole thing is fucked beyond belief.

Pete pukes later in the night and the flowers are deep purple hydrangeas.

* * *

“You’re being weird,” Patrick says to Pete a couple of days later.

Progress report: Everything is bad!

He hasn’t said anything yet. Clearly. He’s drafting ways to say it to Patrick in his iPhone notes and then erasing them and he’s ordering flowers and canceling them because _oh my God that would be bad_ and he’s just postponing the whole thing until it becomes unbearable. Sometimes the sting of his knees hitting the dirty tile of a bathroom will knock everything back into perspective, but even that swirls down the toilet, it gets spit into the sink with mouthwash. And Pete’s hands shake when he cups water into his hands, they tremble so hard that there’s nothing left in them when he brings them to his face but he doesn’t know what to do.

“Am I?” Pete asks, looking over. They’re hanging out in the studio, putting finishing touches on _Save Rock and Roll._ The studio is dark because that’s just the mood lighting and… it would be so easy to say it to Patrick now, because he wouldn’t be able to see the look of horror on Patrick’s face. He wouldn’t have to watch Patrick stutter over an apology and try to bargain with the part of Pete that can’t be bargained with. Pete would sneer something like _‘no one can make sense of my head, so what made you think you could make sense of my heart?’_ and Patrick would say something like that he can’t do this right now and that he’s sorry and Pete would say that he’s sorry too.

There’s that taste in his mouth again. Driving to Patrick’s place at the break of dawn any given morning after it had rained in 2002, right when everything was so new.

“Yeah. _You are_ ,” Patrick says. “What’s wrong.”

“Head’s just loud…” Pete settles for. Patrick knows what that means, knows how vague yet specific the feeling is. Like the fog on a windshield that never really goes away. “I’m… I don’t know, guess still nervous about everything falling apart. I feel like it’s too good to be true, like I’m gonna fuck it all up again.”

And there is some truth in that — the fear of messing it all up. That’s what he wrote, isn’t it, that trouble seems to follow him wherever he goes? Here it is already, right in his core and growing everyday. But it’s _easy_ to be in love with Patrick when you know him the way Pete knows him and the way that his mind works and the way that he completely transforms everything Pete writes. He’s fucking magic and Pete would be the first one to tell you. 

“We’re golden,” Patrick tells him and he’s so sure of it. “And you aren’t that same person, I’m not that same person, we’re— we’re good now, man. And don’t say that you’ll fuck it up because that was a collective— I mean, maybe with the exception of Andy, that was a collective fuck up. A group effort or something.”

“Yeah, but I’ll start it,” Pete pushes. “I always start it.”

“What are you trying to tell me right now?” Patrick asks. “Because you’re trying to tell me something right now, you’ve got that look on your face.”

Patrick’s always seen through Pete in the dark. On rooftop parties with models, in dirty basements sleeping on the floor. How many times on tour during the summer months Pete’s smoked a cigarette outside in the humid night air with Patrick beside him and they’ve communicated through glances...

“Yeah, I am,” Pete confesses. “It’s just… totally fucked.”

“I mean… fucked is subjective,” Patrick says. “You know I wouldn’t judge you unless it was some like… kiddie shit.”

“Dude,” Pete brings his hands to his head. “ _No_.”

“So you’re good!” Patrick reaches over and clasps a hand on Pete’s shoulder. And he’s joking around but there’s something in his eyes that Pete sees past the thick rimmed black glasses, something that reminds Pete that he’s not alone. “You know I’m always here to listen even if I don’t always get it.”

Contrary to everyone’s belief, Pete needs people to invite him in before he starts spilling his guts. And the thing is that he knows, he _knows_ , that if he were in love with anyone else, he would have already told Patrick, because Patrick doesn’t always know what the fuck goes on in his head, and his advice is sometimes the worse shit Pete’s ever heard, but Patrick listens. He was right about that. 

So… Pete baby-steps this.

“So...you know that I’m bisexual right?” Pete asks. 

“Uh… yeah,” Patrick says, looking a little confused. “I didn’t think you stage-gayed with Mikey Way for three months. Are you coming out? I thought it was an unspoken thing.”

“An unspoken thing?” Pete asks, faking his own confusion. And Pete’s a fairly terrible actor, but Patrick seems to be falling for it. Unless Patrick’s also being an actor, which… is too many levels for Pete right now. 

“Yeah, like… me _also_ being bisexual…” Patrick says slowly, looking thoroughly uncomfortable. _By what,_ Pete wants to ask. “Like it’s— it’s a thing but we don’t have to make it a thing because everyone will make it weird.”

“Everyone?” Pete asks, leaning in as if the closer he got to Patrick the more clear the meaning behind the words will come through. Right now he’s coming up gray. 

“I mean the fans,” Patrick says. He laughs awkwardly. “About— I mean, _you know._ ”

“And that would be a bad thing,” Pete asks. “Right?”

“I don’t like the idea of— I don’t know. But dude, _I know_ that you’re bisexual. If that’s— yay bisexual buddies. Like—”

“No, sorry,” Pete says. “I was just freaking out, you know, like I do.”

So… that was bad. And Patrick didn’t seem too keen on the idea of people knowing. But call Pete crazy, Patrick didn’t seem repulsed by _the idea of them_ as much as he seemed repulsed by all of the mayhem that would follow. It’s not a no… but it’s not a yes. Pete’s exactly where he started with the exception that he at least knows for _certain_ that Patrick goes both ways.

It’s the little things— _baby-steps_! The flowers seem to agree with him about this small victory, because when he violently vomits up all of the Chipotle Joe and Andy brought, the flowers that come up with it are yellow carnations— Pete’s favorite.

* * *

On Valentine’s Day, Pete is… unwell.

He still hasn’t told Patrick— the fear of Patrick not loving him back has settled and as the sand in the hourglass inches toward the bottom, the fear of losing his life has come in and has, ironically, put him into a depression. It would be a lie to say that Pete’s always wanted to die— there are moments in life where he’s so happy it’s unreal. Sometimes the band and their crew will be sitting in a diner alone and there will be a really good song playing over the radio and his coffee would have exactly the right amount of milk and sugar in it, and a sense of serenity will suddenly overcome him. Sometimes he’ll take Bronx to the park and he’ll grin at him from the top of the slide and his curly blond hair will look sparkly in the sunlight and Pete’ll forget there was ever such a thing as wanting to just _sleep_. But those moments are few and far between, and there is always a trail of darkness when it comes to Pete. It’s all over his hands and it stains.

Pete looks in the full-length mirror in his bathroom at his chest. His torso is a pinkish-blueish-purpleish color, but it doesn’t look like a bruise…? The skin there is thin and transparent almost, the color from the flowers growing within him is what is peaking through. Lower than that, a little bit over his tattoo, there’s green— leaves. It’s fucking grotesque and he needs to fucking tell Patrick but he can’t, he just can’t. Like, he _physically_ can’t do it. Because his mind keeps playing these fucking games with him and twisting reality and how Patrick will react but maybe, maybe Patrick _will_ hate him and maybe the whole band will fall apart and he just got it back, the world _just_ got Fall Out Boy back. 

So, he doesn’t tell Patrick— he climbs back into bed and buries himself in his duvet and he ignores the calls asking where he is and why he’s not in the studio because he can’t even get himself into clothes, nevertheless drive and face the music. Literally, the music. Because they’re… in the studio.

Anyways…

Pete half-wakes up to a startled scream that definitely _doesn’t_ sound like it's coming from Bronx a couple of hours later. He reaches over to chuck his alarm clock at whoever it is, though the sight of his chest will probably send whoever it is flying out the door, and he hears the sound of it hitting bone.

“Are you fucking crazy?!” Patrick yells at him from his spot on the floor, clutching at his knee. “It’s me!”

And that _wakes_ Pete up.

“Get out!” Pete yells back, reaching desperately for the covers. “What the fuck are you doing here?!”

“You weren’t answering anyone!” Patrick sputters out. “So I called Brendon to see if you— and then he told me that you—” 

And then he motions towards his own chest. “—have the, the, the _thing!”_

“I’m going to throw up,” Pete warns, as the taste of rain floods his mouth. And true to his word, he vomits flowers on the floor— gerbera daisies and lilies and orchids with the stems still attached so he chokes over it and there’s blood when he coughs up bile and it’s just. A fucking mess!

“Sorry,” Pete gasps out, reaching a hand out when Patrick tries to come closer. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, fuck, just leave, it’s—”

And then he pukes some more. 

He feels Patrick’s cool touch on his back and Patrick’s voice guiding him through it, through the motions, and once Pete’s done, once there’s a sea of flowers and roses drenched in stomach acid in front of them, he starts freaking out.

“It’s you,” Pete says, his stomach lurching as the tears begin to spring at his eyes. “I’m so sorry, it’s you.”

The scene is gross. There’s no denying that. This is not where Pete wanted to say it, or how he wanted to say it, but… this is what they’ve got. Kneeling on the floor and covered in spit and tears. 

“It’s okay,” Patrick says, his voice shaking as he pulls Pete into his chest. “It’s okay, fuck, it’s okay.”

“It’s not okay,” Pete sobs harder. “It’s not because—look at this! And I—I love you and it’s fucked up because we’re like, like, _brothers_ or something, you’re my best friend and I’ve been feeling like for long that it was becoming easy to ignore but then this came up and—”

“ _Pete_ ,” Patrick laughs, as if this is fucking funny. “Pete, _stop_ , I love you too.”

“No, not like that,” Pete pulls away from Patrick, shaking his head. He knows he’s an ungodly sight right now, he _knows_ it. “Like… _love_. Like, I’m in love with you.”

“I know,” Patrick says. “I’m in love with you too.”

“No, you aren’t,” Pete says. Because... _huh_. “You’re just saying that because you saw how— how fucked up my body is and how I’m gonna die and how I just _threw up all over you!”_

“You’re my best friend and… and of course I wouldn’t want you to die, but I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t mean it,” Patrick says, and he’s still laughing, but it’s like… sad laughter. It was the same laugh, Pete remembers now, when Pete showed Patrick the bassline to _Where Did The Party Go_ before he said he wanted to use it for Fall Out Boy. And actually… it’s the same laugh from when they had that conversation about what would happen if Patrick really did come out. That sort of… _I don’t know where we stand right now_ sound. “I mean, I didn’t say anything that other day because I didn’t know what you were asking and you didn’t say it and so I didn’t say it and so—”

“We’re idiots,” Pete says. “We’re idiots and now we’re sitting in a cesspool of—”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Patrick winces. “Here, you— get in the shower and I’ll clean this and we’ll reconvene in twenty minutes?”

Maybe Patrick _does_ love Pete— Pete really can’t see anyone else literally cleaning the contents of his stomach for him and not making a huge deal out of it. Patrick stands and helps Pete to his feet and he rolls his eyes when Pete makes a joke, while still crying, about slipping over it, and he rests a hand on Pete’s shoulder before he goes into the bathroom, a silent promise that he isn’t going to go anywhere. 

Pete finds Patrick, twenty minutes and fresh out of the shower later, on his hands and knees wearing gloves and scrubbing at the floor. And they share the same look of disbelief, the same _I can’t believe this is happening_ grin. 

“This is so gross,” Pete says, walking over. He’s in a fresh pair of sweatpants that sit low on his hips and he’s still shirtless, but the flowers beneath the skin don’t look too bad anymore. Better than that, they aren’t protruding out and making themselves known— all is _sort of_ calm. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Patrick says. “Open a new garbage bag?”

Pete does as he’s told and Patrick tosses a bunch of paper towels in along with his gloves in there. The room is clean and now they’re two people in love staring at each other. Patrick’s covered in a thin sheen of sweat and his glasses are sliding down the slope of his nose and his hair is in his eyes and Pete wants to kiss him, that feels pretty appropriate, but he’s afraid to because…

“What are you waiting for?” Patrick asks, almost breathless.

“I don’t want to excite the flowers,” Pete says. “And that’s _not_ a euphemism.”

But, as it turns out, your body will always prioritize kissing over flowers on the floor. That, or Patrick’s just really good at it.

Pete 1, Valentine’s Day Curse 0. 

**Author's Note:**

> IF U FOLLOW ME ON TUMBLR IM SO SORRY I WAS BEING DRAMATIC FOR /THIS/ SHIT.... i know its not much or even anyhthing at all and that it took forever to write.. i was distraught abt the fact that i’m not julian casablancas’s barely legal gf :( but lmao see where the title comes from... pete's like do you even mind that iiiiii left flowers on the floor and patricks like ya its fucking gross but its ok i dont have a gag reflex gang ganggggg
> 
> but.. I hope yall liked this!! writing it was harder than I thought -_- i still don’t know how to write Actual Adults.......... me trying to emulate the voice of a 33 yr old man while im a 20 yr old girl LMAOOOO stop I can't!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and writing patrick is always always ALWAYS ALWAYSSSSSSSS hard for me.... which is kinda funny because i feel like i identify w Patrick more than Peter... but whatever 
> 
> life updates for anyone who subscribes to my writing: I GOT MCR TICKETSSSSSSSSS BITCH WASSUPPPPPPP im seeing them at barclays center :]]]] mikey way I love you im so sorry I killed you off in eapotato!!!!!!!!! also im seeing Halsey twice in July!!! and im seeing Grouplove in may!! and sleeping with sirens in may (don't @ me)!! and I did not get my hella mega tickets yet and I lowkey might not because why the fuck am I seeing fob in a stadium for!! idk I feel like im a fake emo because I kinda couldn't give a shit about Green Day but then im literally seeing MCR so maybe I am a real emo?? leave me a comment if you think im emo. like, im seeing sleeping with sirens but I don't think that's emo I just think thats me trying to relive middle school... bitches be like *listens to 'if you can't hang' on their hot pink iPod nano and cries in 8th grade art class* :////
> 
> tumblr: thatbluelight :)


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